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Visiting Writers Series to Feature Joan Silber

The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature novelist Joan Silber on Wednesday, April 11, at 7 p.m. at the Knickerbocker Theatre in downtown Holland.

The public is invited. Admission is free.

Silber's most recent book, "Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories," a collection in which a minor element in one story becomes a major element in the next, was a finalist for a National Book Award and The Story Prize. She is the author of four other acclaimed books of fiction and the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award for her novel "Household Words," and an award from the Guggenheim Foundation.

Novelist Margot Livesey has written, "I know no one else who writes as Joan Silber does, with such an immediate contemporary voice, about our secret yearnings for a spiritual life."

Her stories have been published in "The New Yorker," "Ploughshares," "The Paris Review," and other magazines. Silber lives in New York City and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, from which she graduated, and has taught in the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. Program.

The Hope College Jazz Ensemble will precede the reading at the Knickerbocker with a 6:30 p.m. performance. Additional information may be obtained online by visiting www.hope.edu/vws.